Happy Birthday Cliff, It's Ghana Be Exciting

Hey everyone! Long time, no blog.  Today is a momentous day for my big brother.  Cliff is turning 28, so, he deserves a shout out from my recent stop in Ghana. Happy Birthday Cliff!

Now, I'll say a little about Ghana.  The country was an amazing experience in seeing what poverty looks like, and how the less fortunate part of the world survives. I roamed around the capital city of Accra the first day visiting markets, an abandoned fort and eating dinner in a slum.  After my friend asked a street vendor where we could eat local food, we taken into an urban slum where a woman cooked fish for us and made bankum (sp?), which is crushed maize.  I saw a man hard at work at his sewing machine after the sun went down, people walking home from wherever they work, women mashing the maize to make bankum, and children playing near us and near their own urine...it was a tough sight to see.  Accra is also the most developed part of Ghana.

The second day I visited slave castles that were used as human warehouses while traders waited on ships to take captives through the Middle Passage.  The conditions were, of course, awful to see.  I learned about how difficult life was before captives even left the African continent.

On the third day, I visited a chocolate factory, the University of Ghana, and a couple markets, which took a little edge off of the pessimism of the first two days.  Accra is still a bustling city, despite its poverty.  The University of Ghana was very exciting because I was able to talk to a law student there about issues in the United States and Ghana.

My fourth day in Ghana was spent listening to experts at the World Bank branch office in Ghana talk about the country and its growth prospects.  For those who didn't know, Ghana was the world's fastest growing economy in 2011 (with the help of oil discoveries).  This means that as long as Ghana can find a way to begin developing the northern region of the country, then it should become a shining example to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa of how to move forward.  Despite the dryness of the technical terms, I enjoyed the entire presentation, especially, when they discussed the World Bank's new policies on transparency.  Check out their website and search for their database, the amount of information should be staggering if you find the right program.

On the fifth and last day, I capped my Ghana experience with a visit to an orphanage.  We played with many of the kids at the local school while they waited two hours for someone to bring their lunch in on a truck.  Eventually we had to leave, but seeing the "school" which was only some trees with chalkboards leaned on them, and meeting the woman running the orphanage, Mama Peace, was certainly an influential experience.

I still have a lot to digest about my experience in Ghana, but it was amazing and I'm glad I was able to visit the places I did.  The opportunity to dwell on things I've never even thought about before, that's why it's an adventure...

Jeff